PDC-PRACE Workshop: “HPC Tools for the Modern Era”

PDC-PRACE Workshop, 25-26 October 2018

Published Nov 11, 2018

Basic HPC usage has not changed much in decades - we still log in to clusters using secure shell, use terminals to execute UNIX commands, submit batch jobs to the job scheduler, and so forth. But that does not mean that the HPC landscape is staying the same. In fact, new tools and novel usage patterns are constantly emerging! On the 25th and 26th of October this year, PDC ran a workshop on “HPC Tools for the Modern Era” in partnership with PRACE to teach some of these modern approaches. The four workshop modules were “HPC tips and tricks”, “Singularity containers”, “Jupyter Notebooks on the cluster” and “Improving your code with Arm Forge”. The Arm Forge lesson focused on the debugging and profiling tools offered in Arm’s HPC toolkit (These tools were formerly known as Allinea Forge.) and was taught by Conrad Hillairet who visited PDC from the Arm headquarters in Cambridge. All the other lessons were taught by the PDC application experts Xin Li, Thor Wikfeldt and Henric Zazzi. If you are interested in having a look at the lesson material, it is all available on the PDC Support pages:
www.pdc.kth.se/support/documents/courses/prace.html
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Workshop feedback was collected after each lesson and at the end of the workshop, and overall it was highly positive. An interesting observation from the general feedback form was that many workshop participants would like to participate in more training on machine learning, big data analytics and GPU programming! This is being discussed at PDC, and more generally within the SNIC training programme, with the intention of offering workshops on these topics in 2019.